Stupidest school supply

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

'Nother teacher here, in California. The state constitution of California requires that public schools provide a free education to all children. That means that we can’t require our kids to bring diddly with them to school.

I teach Art. I can’t tell my kids to go out and buy a pencil. Any project I do in class, I have to supply everything for it. So, even though I only teach two sections of Art (and, hey, I’m the art department for middle and high school), my supply requisition to the district was just short of $1400 for the year.

I get so sick of battling with the kids over silly things. Yes, you have to write in pen in English and Writing. Not pencil. Pen. You’re practically adults now. The work you do should have a level of formality to it, and besides, pencil smears too much. How hard is it to remember a frickin’ pen?

Ivylass, just a thought for you on the contract you mentioned. It may be the administration’s way of nailing negligent parents. If a student is completely disruptive, abusive, or excessively absent, school districts usually have a court-related environment to deal with them (where I teach, it’s the Student Attendance Review Board). The judge who runs it can hold up that signed piece of paper to a parent and say something along the lines of “you signed this, didn’t you? You understand what your responsibilities are, don’t you?”.

Of course, if you don’t sign it (and the ivykid were to land in serious trouble), that refusal would be interpreted as a lack of interest in your kid’s education or an unwillingness to work with the school district. And they’d tell you to sign a compact that just as obnoxious.

As to lockers and backpacks, our middle schoolers aren’t assigned lockers. We don’t have enough. So, by law, we have two sets of every textbook. One goes home with the kid during the first week and returns the last week of school. The other stays in the classroom. Even so, our middle schoolers are doing the Hunchback Strut.

The high schoolers get lockers. Some of them keep their entire lives in there. Some never open them. Most of them don’t bother with the combination locks. We’re a small school, so there isn’t a big problem with theft - and if something get’s stolen, chances are the principal will have the thief in his office before the day is out.

(I am an office supply junkie as well, and it’s one of the reasons I love being a teacher: I get a pretty decent discount at office supply stores and bookstores. Woohoo!)

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wow…i kind of remember coming to school on the first day in my public elementary school and opening my desk to find crayons, etc. already there. we had to get folders and color code things in middle school, and we all had to have binders, but as for the rest of that? i’m floored.

i just recently graduated from a private high school and every year the first day each teacher would tell us what to bring, be it a notebook or a folder or whatever. it was pretty easy. i bought textbooks used online or from other students whenever i could, for the cheapest possible price, and that was that.

143

Another ex-Massachusetts school kid here. So far as I remember, all we had to show up with was whatever we wanted to take notes ON and whatever we wanted to take them WITH.

What amazes me is the utter inefficiency of requiring 30 parents to run around buying one each of a slew of items. Besides the waste in time, haven’t these schools ever heard of the economy of buying in bulk? Not to mention that I bet schools get discounted prices AND probably are exempt from sales tax.

Since they know exactly what they are going to demand from every child, why don’t they just figure out what it costs to buy 30 sets of the whole deal, and just have the parents pay for the 1/30 (or whatever) of the total?

144

They made you pay for the lock? Every school I’ve ever seen with lockers either has you bring your own locks or provides them for you for free, as your lock never leaves that locker, year after year.

Getting back to the original topic:

As for graphing calculators, the school provides them for us. Yes, the math teachers share about 30 graphing calculators. Problem is, every teacher has a different policy. Our classes go like this - Grade 10 is Math 10 and 20, Grade 11 is Math A30 and B30, Grade 12 Math C30 and Calculus. Most people first used a graphing calculator in Math 10, Math 20 at the latest. I first used one in Math B30, I was the only one who had never used one. Even my teacher was shocked. All my other teachers taught manually because you can’t use them on university tests.

As for having your supplies already provided by the school, that shocks me. Here, everyone is required to buy everything. Sometimes teachers will have stuff you can borrow, but if they don’t have any scissors or anything around, you are out of luck. Of course, sharing goes on with the students too.

I’ve never really had anything odd on my supply list. Besides, they aren’t strict. If you use a notebook instead of a binder, they won’t freak out.

145

My daughter’s middle school gym uniform was $50, but she was able to use it all three years. Her high school gym uniform was $60 (gasp! for a freaking t-shirt and those soccer-type shorts!), and I’m hoping it will last four years. The gym lockers have locks on them already, so they don’t have to pay for or even provide locks. She’s still using the same lock (for her hall locker) I bought for her back in sixth grade, so that was a bargain.

I’d say something to the teacher (or even the principal) that “one dark colored pen” is too ambiguous. Why not just write “one red pen for corrections”? Sounds like the teacher has some passive-aggresive issue and gets off on yelling at the kids who don’t get it right.

My son is starting second grade and their assignment book (required, must be purchased from the shcool) is only $3.

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I’ve had to deal with that two ways over the years – (1) Buy a lock from the school (they explained it as they wanted a specific type of lock to be sure their master could open it), or (b) Rent a lock for the year and they’d keep it and rent it out again the next year.

Both ways are ridiculous. All they had to say was bring a Master combination lock and provide us with the combination just in case. But hey, it was a chance for them to make $$ to use somewhere in the school, so I can’t totally blame them.

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For those of you with kids who can’t use lockers, be careful. There’s nothing quite like hossing around a pack that is literally 1/3 of your body weight; it ain’t exactly good for your back.

148

We had to pay for our locks in high school. And as Mama Tiger said, you couldn’t bring your own–you had to buy theirs.

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I keep coming back to this thread and trying to remember what I had to pay for in past years.

One thing I do know was that I had to buy my school locks from the school itself, at about the same price as what I could get in a store anyways (maybe rounded to a whole dollar value). This way the school could have the combination in case they needed to get into my locker. I bought two - one for the hallway locker and another for my gym locker. I used the same 2 every year (5 years) of high school, then I used the hallway one for 2 years in College. I’ve lost that one somehow, or gave it to my sister, but I have the gym one still, and it’s locking our storeroom “cell” in the basement of our apartment building.

I remember having to buy binders - I used to use one for each class, but eventually broke it down into “back-to-back” classes, where I often had two or three classes per binder. In a six-class-per-day cycle, my morning and afternoon classes were often divided up. I also had to provide pens and paper, which I figure is obvious, since some people use more or less than others and it shouldn’t be the school’s responsibility to cover our letter-writing :slight_smile: I wasn’t required to get a graphing calculator, but my sister, 2 years younger, was. I used the same scientific calculator from grade 8 through to last year (3rd year university) at which point I switched to a new one because I simply prefered it and it was the one I used at work anyways.

In elementary school, I (well, my mom) paid for duotangs and crayons and glue, etc, but I seem to recall paper and notebooks being provided (at least in the DND school I was in from grades 4 to 6).

OF couse, I’ve always been the type to reuse and try and save my things from year to year, so I wasn’t likely all that expensive to provide for in terms of school supplies. My sister, however…well, she was the “sparkly” kind of person :slight_smile: